The present invention concerns communications equipment in a combat vehicle with at least one transmitting antenna and at least one receiving antenna and with more communications terminals than transmitting antennas or receiving antennas.
The need for communications has been constantly increasing lately in the military field as well. Contemporary combat vehicles are accordingly provided with several communications terminals. These terminals not only communicate general information but also individually between specified system components (data terminals and parties to discussions). Because of the statistical independence of the data being communicated, there is no fixed schematics for the interchange of data between various communications systems.
There is accordingly a need in principle for reliable parallel operation of all communications terminals, within the same frequency band if necessary. At the current state of the art, each combat vehicle has an antenna for each terminal, meaning that several antennas must often be mounted on one and the same vehicle. In the extreme case, combat vehicles of the most recent generation would need six or more antennas to handle all the necessary signal paths. The need for so many antennas, which high-frequency technology requires to be far enough apart from one another, directly contradicts another need, for small and extremely mobile vehicles of high combat effectiveness. The situation is rendered particularly problematic by the concomitant needs for radar antennas, which, like pivoting weapons, must have access to the azimuth unimpeded by other antennas, and for antennas employed to sense the coordinates of the vehicle in space.
There is accordingly a need to couple as many communications terminals as possible with a minimum of antennas. An ideal solution would be to decrease the number of antennas employed in any particular frequency band. This solution, however, is not technically feasible because operation of the separate terminals could not be ensured in all conceivable situations. The terminals would "jam" one another.